The Ragtime Kid (5 page)

Overstreet looked at Hastain, who quickly looked away. The doctor had known Bud a long time, and no question, he was a good man. Hastain knew it shouldn’t be up to Overstreet to try to squeeze money out of businessmen to underwrite a street fair. But Bud was not about to take on John Bothwell, not over an issue so important to the senator, and certainly not in public.

“If they don’t have the sense to contribute willingly, then get a general assessment passed,” Bothwell stormed. “You should be able to talk that through the City Council. If you need help, Bud will give you a hand.”

Clear to Walter Overstreet what Bothwell thought of a mayor who’d need help to ram a general assessment through a city council. The doctor set his jaw the way he did when he was about to give holy hell to some drunken yard man who’d beaten up his wife. “Listen to me, John. Most of these businessmen on Ohio, and on Lamine and Osage and Kentucky and every other street, for that matter, are just scraping by. They work from sunup to sundown, and barely make enough to feed and house their families. They’re already taxed heavily, and I’m not going to lay another burden on them. It’s as simple as that.”

Bothwell balled both fists. He lowered his head, the better to glare at Overstreet from beneath his massive brows, a look that usually brought anyone from a naughty child to an erring employee directly into line. But Overstreet had nothing to lose beyond his mayoral office, hardly a deterrent. “Pick out the merchants who are doing well,” he said evenly. “Talk to them. Show them it would be to their advantage to sponsor the street fair. But do it yourself. I’m not your errand boy.”

Bothwell let out a noise, half-grunt, half-growl, and jumped to his feet. Hastain moved quickly to position himself between the two men. “John, he might have a point. Voluntary contributions from the bigger companies probably would be better. We don’t want word getting around that smaller businesses are leaving Sedalia because they’re getting taxed past the limit. Besides, Walter really doesn’t have the time…” Hastain looked over his shoulder at Overstreet, winked, and turned back to Bothwell. “…or the talent for drumming up contributions. Leave it to me. I’ll take care of it.”

Bothwell’s face contorted in disgust. He glanced at Overstreet, then nodded several times, like he was trying to convince himself. Then he gave Hastain a heavy dose of his famous glare, and said, “All right. I’ll be out of town most of the rest of the summer, drumming up support around the state, so I’ll leave you in charge here. Just remember, if we don’t get that Fair, we might as well board up the city. All the time we’ve put into the Build Factories Drive, all the calls and letters going out all over the country to convince businesses they should move here, or at least expand? Without the Fair, what are we going to have to bring in that trade? You think the whorehouses down on West Main are going to get respectable businesses to relocate in Sedalia?”

Overstreet worked to keep a smile off his face. He spent a fair bit of time down on West Main, attending to knifings and shooting victims, or a prostitute writhing on her bed, feverish with abdominal gonorrhea, and he could have told John Bothwell about quite a nice number of respectable businessmen he’d spotted on West Main late at night. The doctor liked the lively, syncopated piano music he heard through the open doorways of the saloons and brothels—but then, he was an acknowledged nonbeliever, a member of no church, so why shouldn’t he appreciate the music of the devil?

“I think we ought to just close those damn places down,” Bothwell snapped. “Battle Row! The clergy all over town are getting louder and louder about it. Hell, even the colored preachers want Main cleaned up.”

“Even the colored preachers,” Overstreet thought. Jesus!

Bothwell wasn’t finished. “Maybe we should listen to them. Until we get that Fair locked up and delivered, this needs to be the cleanest town in the Union.”

“Be that as it may,” said Overstreet. “You might make the preachers happy, but not a whole lot of other people. Shutting down West Main is probably the best thing you could do to cause trouble.” He flashed a sly smile at Hastain. “What do you say, Bud?”

Hastain’s face colored, but he laughed. “He’s right, John. Get the parlors off West Main, you’ll still have the fights and the killings, but they’ll be going on all over town instead of just on one street. People will be screaming about how they can’t walk out of their houses at night.”

Bothwell snorted. “All right, all right. But Walter, you talk to Chief Love, you hear? Make good and goddamn sure he’s got cops watching those places.”

Overstreet sighed, then nodded, and watched his visitors out the door, then poured himself another belt of scotch and knocked it down. He trudged upstairs, all the while trying to shut out his father’s longwinded sermon about sons who stray from their proper medical duties to sully their hands and good names by taking part in filthy political schemes and intrigues. Overstreet shucked his shirt and trousers onto a straightbacked chair, and fell into bed. He was more than weary. He’d been more than weary for a long time.

***

Young Brun Campbell dropped to his hands and knees, and begged pardon of the woman he’d just kicked. Icy water popped out all over his skin. When the woman didn’t respond, Brun wondered had she fainted. Women did that, he knew, with a fair degree of regularity; he’d seen many such performances. A man properly responded by cradling the head of the stricken lady, rubbing her wrists, and giving her smelling salts and sips of water. Brun had neither salts nor water on his person, but he set out to do the best he could. Tall weeds scratched at his hands and face, so he slid an arm beneath the woman’s head, and carefully pulled her into the open. Her head flopped like a rag doll’s against his chest. Long, dark hair, wet and tangled, fell across her face.

Brun wriggled out of his jacket, folded it and shoved it under the woman’s head, then reached for her hand. It felt like putty. He rubbed at her wrist, troublesome because he needed to work around a small locket on a chain. Once again he misused the name of the Lord, then snapped the locket free and without a conscious thought, slipped it into his pocket. He patted the woman’s palm, kneaded her wrist hard as he dared. “Wake up, Lady,” he whispered. “Please.”

Right about then, it began to dawn on him. To look straight into her face, he’d had to twist himself into a most uncomfortable sidewise attitude. The woman seemed to be looking to the right, upward and backward, and when Brun tried to move his own head the same way, he couldn’t even come close. He reached a hand behind the woman’s head and lifted, whereupon chills coursed through his body. That head felt like it was attached to the rest of the woman only by skin. Any small way Brun moved his hand, the head lolled in a different direction, and the boy got a terrible feeling if he let go too quickly, the woman’s head, pretty hair and all, might just come loose and go rolling down the street.

Fighting a strong inclination to cut and run, Brun pulled a lucifer from his pocket and snapped a shaking thumbnail across the tip. On the third try, light flared. Brun brushed the woman’s hair to the side, and looked closely into her face. Once, she had been pretty, and not all that long ago. But her gaping mouth and bulgy, staring eyes did a fine job of ruining her appearance. If more was needed, the dark bruise marks over her neck took care of that.

Maybe Brun was never much of a scholar in the classroom, but he had not the least trouble seeing what a disadvantageous situation he’d fallen into. A stranger in town, looking not even close to reputable after his boxcar rides, caught kneeling over the body of a woman very recently choked to death? Didn’t take much imagination to see himself looking at the inside of a jail, maybe even at a noose. Best to put as much space between that woman and himself in the shortest possible time.

He blew out the lucifer, grabbed his jacket, whispered a hoarse, “Sorry, Miss,” and scrambled to his feet. But as he turned to run, he noticed something gleaming in the moonlight at the edge of the weeds. He sprang past the woman and picked it up. It looked to be some three inches long, in the shape of a musical lyre, and it held small pieces of paper. A money-clip. Brun looked around, no one in sight. He started to shove the clip into his pocket, hesitated, then went through with the act. What were the chances that money-clip would get past the next person who tripped over the body, or the copper who got called when the body was found? Leaving clip and money made less than no sense.

Brun commenced slapping leather along the dirt road. At the first corner, he turned left, then kept close to the edge of the street as he flew past dark houses and vacant lots. A sudden loud noise froze him for a moment, but then he realized it was just a horse tethered in a back yard, and he took off afresh. A couple more blocks brought him to the business section of town. To his left were dark buildings, shops and banks; to his right, lights and the sound of human voices. He turned right and slowed his pace to a rapid walk. A half-block along, just past an alleyway, he came up on a saloon, Boutell’s, according to the gold block letters on the window. Maybe he could sweep up or wash some dishes for food. He took just long enough to smooth down his hair, then pushed through the swinging doors.

Boutell’s Saloon was a small room, occupied right then by five men at the bar and another twenty or so sitting around five oak tables, drinking and playing cards. Customers and bartender were all white. A couple of geezers in blue shirts and overalls stood at the far end of the bar, nursing glasses of whiskey and taking turns feeding nickels into a little counter-top slot machine. No dice, no girls. Just a quiet watering hole for Sedalia’s working men.

Against the far wall stood an upright piano, no one at the stool. Brun’s spirits took a sharp turn upward—that piano was not there for decoration. Just about every refreshment parlor had its piano player, but they were not what you’d call steady citizens. Odds were at least fair that Boutell’s was in the market for a musician.

Brun started toward the piano, but then considered that a bit of discretion might be in order, so he reversed direction and ambled to the bar. The bartender, a hefty man in his fifties, slouched against a keg as he wiped his face on a towel. A sparse crop of stringy gray hair crowned his head, and he was permanently stooped to the right, as if to accommodate to his work. He sized Brun up over the towel in his hand, then said, “Out a bit late, ain’t you, sonny?”

One of the graybeards in overalls at the slot machine let out a rheumy cackle. Another man, well-dressed, with dark hair and a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard, studied the new arrival from his stool at the bar. Brun figured him for some kind of drummer.

“These are my customary hours,” the boy said, as boldly as he knew how. He pointed at the silent piano. “I play, and am looking for work.”

The barman’s lips twisted into a crooked smile. “You’re not from here.”

Brun cursed himself mildly for not having considered this question in advance. For one thing, the bartender might know at first hand any place Brun mentioned; for another, a lot of people paid close heed to a man’s speech. The War was over some thirty-five years, but in Missouri or Kansas, the way you spoke a sentence might still get you either a pat on the back or a dose of lead in the belly.

“Arkansas City,” Brun said, which was where the Campbells had lived before El Reno. “I played piano in hotels and saloons.”

The barkeep tipped his head and gave the boy a long, hard stare. “You’re how old?”

“Almost seventeen.” Brun stuck out his hand. “My name is Brun Campbell. I was a student for a little while of Otis Saunders. You know him?”

Brun’s hand disappeared inside the bartender’s paw. “Gaylord Boutell,” the man said. “Sure I know Otis Saunders. Didn’t know he ever was to Arkansas City, though.”

Brun told himself not to talk too fast. “Actually, I met him one day last summer while I was in Oklahoma City. He showed me how to play a tune by Scott Joplin. Now, I’m bound to meet Scott and get him to give me lessons. But I’m going to need work.”

Boutell wagged a hand toward the piano. “Let’s hear that tune Saunders taught you.”

As Brun strode to the piano, his stomach growled. He sat, stretched his back and fingers, then commenced to play.

All through the smoky saloon, people stopped drinking, talking, playing cards. When Brun wound up “Maple Leaf” with a little flourish, there was great general whistling and shouting. The boy heard an old man’s voice carry above the crowd, “My eyes must be goin’ bad. I swear that’s a white kid, but way he plays, he’s gotta be a nigger.”

Brun once told me that no compliment he ever received pleased him more. Boutell called out, “Pretty good. What else can you play?”

“Whatever you want to hear,” Brun called back.

“‘Old Oaken Bucket,’” someone shouted.

Brun swung around and played that awful song, but he ragged it, the way he’d learned from Ben Harney’s folio. “Damn hottest oaken bucket I ever heard,” somebody shouted. “Betcha can’t do that with ‘In the Baggage Coach Ahead,’” someone else hollered.

“You’re going to lose your money, sir,” Brun called over his shoulder, and swung into that sloppy little tearjerker about a man on a train, taking his wife’s body home for burial, who gets help from the other passengers in caring for his crying baby. But written as the tune was, in straight waltz-time, it was no trick for Brun to ring in some syncopation, and the longer he played, the louder got the hoo-ing and the hah-ing and the wow-ing. That gang in the bar thought Brun was some kind of sweet onion. When he finished “Baggage Coach,” people fell all over themselves calling out their favorites, and the boy played every one, lively cakewalks, grand marches, mush even more sentimental than “Baggage Coach.” Finally, Boutell called him back up to the bar. As Brun shoved his way through the crowd, men slapped his back and shoulders. Some pushed coins into his hand. By the time he reached the bar, he was giddy with pleasure. “Yes, sir?” he asked Boutell.

“You play all right,” the barkeep said. “How long you been in town?”

“Not two hours, sir. First thing I came in, I saw your lights and the piano, so I figured to strike while the iron was hot.”